Life ‘after’ X

The big buzz in literary and art circles is over how the Palace seems intent on shafting NCCA chair Jaime Laya. The bigger buzz is the incredulity over how the powers-that-be are doing this only because former senator Leticia Shahani wants Laya’s job.

Okay, we’ve been through this before. The situation is quite clear to us, and only keeps getting muddled because a Ms. Shahani can’t seem to accept "Life After X."

A couple of Tuesdays ago, she reportedly made sumbong to Ate Glo (the President of the Republic of the Philippines, mind you) about how she had been "shabbily treated" at NCCA when she descended upon the premises anew to continue her attempts at a squeeze play. That is, trying to squeeze herself into the voting body that will elect the chair of the National Commission on Culture and the Arts.

It doesn’t seem clear to Ms. Shahani that there’s due process involved, and that she can’t just force her way in. Being informed about the legitimacy of this established process, she takes it to be "shabby treatment" and reports the matter to the President.

The result is that the incumbent chair, whom a majority of artists and cultural workers want to re-elect, is told the next day by phone that the process has to be deferred.

Till when? Perhaps till the end of the month, or until an investigation into the reported "shabby treatment" is conducted. Already, a letter from deputy executive secretary Waldo Flores has been addressed to the NCCA leadership, seeking an explication on Ms. Shahani’s sumbong.

Now, political observers among the culturati ask, what could the President possibly gain by supporting Ms. Shahani’s bid to wrest the NCCA from Jimmy Laya? The former senator can’t even help her son win a local election, it is said. Neither may she claim to enjoy any substantial constituency that the President can count on, at the risk of antagonizing the cultural community. No trade-off would appear palatable to a politically wizened presidency.

With all the media flak that Ms. Shahani’s efforts to take over the NCCA have drawn, it doesn’t stand to reason that Her Excellency will support Letty all the way. Certain Palace insiders shrug off the latest impasse as possibly just a token gesture of politesse on GMA’s part. She couldn’t well have ignored Ms. Shahani’s entreaties. But to back her all the way and virtually install her as NCCA head is another matter. She has enough advisers to tell her that a hue and cry among the culturati will be the obvious consequence.

Surely another position can be given Ms. Shahani. Surely there’s ‘Life after X’ – meaning a spent force in politics can be rewarded with some other posting that won’t result in controversy.

Credible scuttlebutt had it that the Palace asked former CCP head Baltazar Endriga for an acceptable replacement for Mr. Laya. Former DECS undersecretary and retired UNESCO honcho Victor Ordoñez, who happened to be around, was Mr. Endriga’s choice. He would have been offered the post, except that Vic Ordoñez made it clear that he had had enough of the bureaucratic life. Besides, he prefers to reside in Honolulu and finish a novel he’s been working on.

So if it can’t be Letty – because the brazen political reward will only get artists and writers up in arms – and if Jimmy shouldn’t continue – because of his so-called "Marcosian past," and despite the fact that most of the NCCA officials and rank-and-file are joined by observers in acknowledging his effectivity as chair – then who else?

Can the Palace come up with another name that’ll be acceptable to the cultural community, given increasingly short notice?

Here’s a conundrum of its own making that Malacañang can do without. And the President would be best advised to keep the status quo, refrain from further rocking the boat, and simply observe the age-old principle: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Let Jimmy Laya stay at his post, as the overwhelming choice of a constituency that’s ever sensitive to needless political meddling. The sooner the cultural communty is assured that the NCCA charter is respected, the better for everyone.

Surely there can be another kind of ‘life after X’ for anyone who wants to keep serving the country, with or without any support from any constituency.

The young writer Sarge Lacuesta is one lucky fella; he might as well be Rockefeller. Last Thursday, he was handed a check for P50,000 as the first winner of the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award.

Administered in cordination with the UP Creative Writing Center, the award was given in simple ceremonies held at Alliance Française.

Lacuesta’s winning book is Life Before X and Other Stories, published last year by UP Press. Last November, I had occasion to cite this book as a keepsake, for its obvious value as a collection of well-crafted short fiction.

Let me repeat myself in this space, for those who still have to be impressed by Angelo Rodriguez Lacuesta’s work:

"At only 30, Sarge Lacuesta has been a serial winner for short fiction in both the Palanca and Graphic magazine awards. Here he collects 10 stories, including those prizewinners. An Ateneo and UP graduate, in Biology (!), he cut short a potential medical career and wound up cutting his teeth in advertising, all because he attended writers’ workshops, including Dumaguete’s, and resolved to become a writer. Now he has set up his own advertising firm, Logika, Inc., with himself as president and creative director.

"Having known him since he was knee-high, as the son of our friend, the late great film scenarist Amado ‘Mads’ Lacuesta and literature teacher Lolit Lacuesta, who’s now teaching at UP Davao, I can vouch for Sarge’s early mastery of the demands of short fiction.

"Here’s quoting from the Introduction to the collection, offered by UP Creative Writing Center director Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo: ‘What these stories have in common is the questions which they raise and do not answer, and the aloneness of their protagonsts. Loneliness, lovelessness, impermanence, death, lie in their heart. Life Before X is an exceptional first book, one which raises expectations for the next one, and the next.’"

Obviously, the judges for the Madrigal-Gonzales Award – Gémino H. Abad, Marjorie Evasco and Jessica Zafra – agreed with Jing Hidalgo’s appreciation. The shortlist they eventually selected from included first books in the past two years by fictionist Reine Arcache Melvin, poet D.M. Reyes and essayist Rene Azurin.

It was Ging Gonzalez Montinola who conceived of the special award for first-time authors. Next year it will be given to a Filipino literary title among first books published in 2000 and 2001.

Now it can be retold. And this one might just make it to a planned volume titled Oral Lit: Anecdotes & Apocrypha on Filipino Writers, culled and edited by Jimmy Abad, Cesar Ruiz Aquino and this columnist.

When the invite was prepared for the awards ceremony at Alliance Française last week, the invaluable UP-CWC workhorse Anthony Serrano was said to have cried out: Stop the presses! Protesting inaccurate text in the invite, he insisted that Lacuesta’s title was not Life Before X... but Life AFTER X...

Lara Saguisag believed him, for Tony is known for his expertise in literary matters, including titles and phone numbers and e-mail addresses of all Filipino pen-pushers. Thus was the "corrected" invite faxed off with the deconstructed title, until the ever-humble Lacuesta sweetly intoned over the phone to Jing Hidalgo, "Ma’m, there’s just one thing wrong with the invitation. The title of my winning book is Life Before X, and not After..."

Well, I myself received the collectible that had the revised if erroneous title, and I’m holding on to it for dear life. I’m just waiting for Mr. Serrano to try to make something of my faulty memory by reminding me of some important date, and I’ll make sure to wave the document before him.

Apropos to which, Jimmy Abad recounted during the prize-giving that it wasn’t as bad as what had happened to one of his titles, when he received an inscribed trophy for his supposed book, A Shore of Habits or somesuch. Well, said a poet – either Ricky de Ungria or Marne Kilates – within earshot: At least it didn’t become A Hobbit House of Shores.

Now here’s a further plug for Lacuesta’s fiction – excerpted passages from a relatively recent story titled "Stigmata," which should join an erotic fiction collection once the gremlins of publishing have been appropriately rewarded with a virgin sacrifice.

"At the Aman resort we make many friends: tourists, bankers, businessmen with their mistresses. She’s a charmer in public. But in bed she’s a chirper. A choker. A shocker. She introduces me to many unnatural acts and techniques. My soft, jet-lagged body is briefly suspended in a lust-filled limbo, then plunged into a savage vigor. Later, I laugh aloud for the first time in two weeks. Aloud and alone, I thank my lucky stars and caress Lene’s ragged white body, spent, slumped across the bed.

"…In the dawn of her departure date, Lene lies naked on my hotel bed, placed diagonally across my naked body. I remain still, with the TV on. When I was a child I had one of those glossy cardboard posters on my wall: God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, the courage to change things I can, etc., etc. How does one apply that to a lost feeling, a flutter of emotion, a burst of impulse? It is at times like these that I think of my wife and kids, alone in their big house. I think of Lene, too. I look down at the skin of my chest, so Asian, so alien, devoid of hair, unlike all of Lene’s men before me. I look at her face, so beautiful while she’s asleep, that I begin to regret all that I’ve told her. To preserve myself, to preserve her self, so that when she flies tomorrow she will not think of me. We will leave this hotel room and others will take our place. Others will take our place."

Since this is a family paper, I’m afraid I can’t share the X-rated passages. Suffice it to say however that Sarge Lacuesta can tell stories with an edge and an edgelessness, whether it’s of life before or after jewels of experience. Read his book. There’ll be a second and a third, and so forth, for sure. But already he’s writing at his X-Gen prime.